Is it Possible to be a Healthy Entrepreneur?

Maintaining a healthy diet is probably the farthest thing from the mind of a young entrepreneur working twenty hours a day on their startup pet project. But should it be?

If you put any stock into what the New York Times has to say, it’s something to at least consider.

A recent article on their wellness blog, citing a Gallup-Healthways analysis of data from the Well-Being Index, found that entrepreneurs tend to eat better and exercise more than other workers. Which is the good news. The flip side of the coin is that they are also more likely to lead stressful lives, and they are less likely to have health insurance.

So that begs the question, is it possible to be an entrepreneur and lead a healthy life?

Unfortunately, stress does have a nasty habit of working its way into the day-to-day world of most entrepreneurs. It takes a lot of courage to put yourself out there with the intention of building something from the ground up. If it was easy, everyone would do it. And as we all know, the risk of failure is omnipresent with start-up and small business endeavors, so sleepless nights can at times become the norm. Should this be enough to dissuade someone from becoming and entrepreneur? Of course not. Is it something worth attempting to curb? Absolutely.

Health insurance is another topic likely to make any small business owner feel sick. Purchasing coverage on the open market is currently an incredibly frustrating and potentially very costly undertaking, so a large number of people simply opt to avoid it altogether and go without health insurance. Fiscal pratfalls of such a decision aside, missing out on preventative care and skipping those yearly checkups has potentially negative repercussions for anyone’s health. Add in the stress factor and you could be asking for trouble.

So what do we do about this? Again, the article did also mention that entrepreneurs tend to eat better and exercise more than other workers, but is that enough to offset the negative effects of the aforementioned traits? Is there anything we can do to avoid these traits in the first place?